


into the light

by pipistrelle



Series: there is a season [12]
Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Demisexual Lark, Demisexuality, F/F, Loneliness, Religion, Slice of Life, Tamora Pierce Femslash Week, The Circle Opens, Winding Circle, low-level angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 17:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2076174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vignette of Lark alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	into the light

**Author's Note:**

> Here, have a wordy exploration of Lark alone at Winding Circle. This takes place sometime during or slightly before the events of Magic Steps/Street Magic, after Sandry has left to live with Vedris but before Comas arrives at Discipline.
> 
> Title from Sara Bareilles' "The Light", which was coincidentally mostly what I listened to as I was writing this.

The Earth Temple was quiet, disturbed only by the chorus of crickets in the summer grass. All doors were open to catch any breeze that stirred in the hot night, but the air inside hung still, thick and syrupy. The departure of the sun had done very little to cool the world, and Winding Circle's walls kept off the sea breeze that might have swept the sticky moisture out of the air. Instead, the heat persisted even as the Hub bell rung the muffled chime that meant midnight and all well.

Lark wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of one sleeve. Green-robed figures were gathering out of the night around her, murmuring to each other, laughing and quarreling in low voices. It was Dedicate Amethyst's turn tonight to light the fires. He moved slowly, an old man bent with the weight of years, but even in this heat that roused tempers, no one showed impatience as they waited for his aching joints to carry him on a circuit around the open inner space. At each of the compass points he paused, bending to light a pinch of different-colored incense in a shallow clay bowl. All the of the Earth Dedicates had gathered by the time he snuffed out the burning reed in the dirt and straightened up to begin the convocation. 

Lark moved into her accustomed place with the habit of nearly twenty years and raised her voice with the others, trying not to notice the large, stocky, dark-skinned man standing to her left. He was a dedicate of only half a year, friendly enough and a fine strong tenor, and he seemed to quietly accept the fact that the woman beside him occasionally darted sideways glances in his direction without any explanation. Lark hadn't yet figured out a way to explain that she couldn't seem to reconcile the fact of him with the lean, pale, auburn-haired silhouette her mind insisted should be there instead.

(For the first moon or so after  Rosethorn's departure, the other Earth dedicates had left the place beside Lark empty, motivated as much by force of habit as any thought for the woman who usually stood there. Now that empty space was generally filled by one of the newer dedicates, who had only a vague notion that there had ever been a  Rosethorn at Winding Circle, let alone that she had been of any particular importance to Lark.

It was no great matter; but there were nights when it made Lark uneasy, unsettled. As though keeping Rosethorn's place had been a way to ensure that she would come home to step into it again.)

The service was brief; no one wanted to stand sweating in the stuffy temple hall singing extra choruses in praise to the gods tonight. The dedicates of the gods of the Earth dispersed, chattering amongst themselves. They would leave the small fires around the circle to burn themselves out, watched over by Dedicate Amethyst, who had settled himself into a chair brought for him by a novice and was either deep in meditation or serenely asleep. Lark was waved over by several friends, all wanting to tell her what temple gossip there was, but she evaded them all politely with pleas of exhaustion and took the spiral path back towards Discipline.

In truth, she was tired, but she knew there would be no finding sleep tonight. Her eyes stung from hours of hunting for minute flaws in the weave of cloth, but closing them brought no relief. Her fingertips itched and her head ached. There was an ache in her chest, too, a hollowness that gnawed at her heart. It was entirely different from the pain and panic of the wheezes, but Lark still found herself thinking of it as a "flare", the word  Rosethorn used for an asthma attack. She knew with miserable certainty that a flare of loneliness and longing would keep her awake long past the edge of exhaustion; and her dreams, if she did manage to fall asleep, would be of the Mire. 

There were more than a few of her fellow Earth dedicates who would have been glad to help her tire herself out enough to sleep, who would have happily taken her back to the dormitories or the loft above the loomhouses and kissed her until she forgot the Mire, and Winding Circle, and her own name. It wasn't merely vanity to think so, either; Lark hadn't forgotten what it meant when women looked at her the way Dedicate Swallowtail did. Swallowtail, Laurel, Watercress -- any of them would come to her bed if she asked, but somehow the thought of asking didn't excite her so much as tire her. She respected and liked them all, very much, but she didn't love them,  could  never love them, the way she loved Rosethorn. They would know that perfectly well -- anyone who knew Lark knew that -- and, like most people, wouldn't require that sort of love as a precursor to the physical. But Lark was unlike most people in that respect.  While she would have given nearly anything to have her own dearest Rosie back at that moment, the thought of going to bed with anyone else seemed aimless, like looking for comfort in the arms of a shadow. 

Discipline came into sight around the bulk of the Hub, but suddenly the thought of going back into that silent and empty house was unbearable. Instead of going back to her workshop to fiddle with spools of thread that would only tangle in her fingers, she slipped in through the garden gate and settled on the grass with her back resting against a young tree. It would have been cooler on top of the wall, but she didn’t dare try to climb the steep stairs in this heat, especially since she'd left the vial of her asthma medicine lying on the table beside her loom.

Rosethorn would have scolded her for that. Lark leaned back against the bark of the tree, feeling its gnarled solidity between her  shoulderblades. She wished vaguely that she had thought to stop inside and get her knitting needles; her fingers itched for something to do. Without any thread to work with, she sank her hands into the grass, into the soil between the roots of the tree. Here, as nowhere else in Winding Circle or the world, she felt connected to the lives and rhythms of green things, of the earth. The tree she leaned on had begun as a shaft in her loom, saturated with her magic on the journey north to  Emelan after she had lost her first family. The loom itself had long since fallen to pieces, but  Rosethorn had planted one small part of it and grown this tree, the largest in the garden, that now twenty years later still hummed with a power that had its roots in  Rosethorn's green magic but called faintly to the fiery spindle at the center of Lark.  

_Where are they?_ she asked the loom-shaft at the heart of the tree, that had helped her to weave her very first mapping.  _ Can you feel them --  Rosethorn and Briar? Are they well? _  


She hadn't expected an answer, which was just as well. If the tree had anything to tell her, it was in the language of green mages, which she couldn't hear.

A welcome breeze rustled in the leaves above her, cooling her for a breath before the clinging heat closed in again. In a few hours, the sun would rise blood-red over the wall, hammering the world into sullen submission. Thinking of it made her think of a hazy afternoon several years ago, a hot day loud with cicadas, when she had overheard Niko explaining to  Tris how the sunrise moved around the entire earth -- how it was broad daylight in  Gyongxe while night reigned around the Pebbled Sea. How the darkness over Winding Circle meant that somewhere in the mountains on the other side of the world,  Rosethorn and her boy would be in the light.

It was a comforting thought, and Lark let it calm her, drawing strength from it as she drew strength from the tree she leaned against. Strength and patience. The best she could do now, for  Rosethorn and for herself, was to be patient and whole, to keep the home that  Rosethorn and Briar would come back to. She knew that this stinging, draining loneliness she felt would pass, and she would once again find the strength and patience to face the life she'd built, now empty of the family she'd built it for.

In the meantime, she prayed for  Shurri Firesword to light her love's steps, for  Asaia Bird-Winged to send her fair winds, for  Yanna Healtouch to keep her well and  Runog to safeguard them on the seas. To the Green Man and Mila of the Grain, to all the gods of  Gyongxe, to the earth that was her only connection to her love, she prayed.  _ Keep her safe and bring her home to me. _


End file.
